Every July, Singapore reminds itself that we are a multiracial society. Schools organise activities, students dress up in traditional costumes, and we get to enjoy the annual parade of cultural appreciation, complete with food, music and perhaps a few teachers attempting to dance to songs they have only just learnt. For a day, the school canteen becomes a miniature cultural festival, and everybody goes home having learnt that different races have different customs, cuisines and traditional clothing.
It is all very lovely, really. And I mean that sincerely. I think there is value in celebrating our differences, especially in a country where people of different ethnicities share the same public spaces, schools, workplaces and, occasionally, the same very thin HDB walls.
But somewhere between the celebrations and the photographs, I find myself asking a question that has become increasingly difficult to answer without feeling exhausted: are we actually racially harmonious, or have we simply learnt to tolerate one another?
I know. It is a rather inconvenient question to ask two days before Racial Harmony Day. It is probably not the sort of question that will make it onto a cheerful school assembly slide, sandwiched between photographs of children in colourful traditional costumes and a reminder to respect one another's cultural practices. But I think it is worth asking, particularly when we have spent so many years congratulating ourselves on being a successful multicultural society.
Perhaps part of my exhaustion comes from having to explain, repeatedly, that racism exists in Singapore. Not that it happens elsewhere and occasionally finds its way here through the internet. Not that it is an imported problem that we can conveniently blame on foreign influences. But that it exists here, among people who grew up here, attended the same schools, served National Service together, queued for the same chicken rice and recited the same National Pledge.
Sometimes, before we can even begin discussing what racism does to a person, we have to establish that racism is a thing that happens to people in the first place. We have to produce examples, explain the context, defend the interpretation and, if necessary, submit supporting evidence as though we are applying for a grant. And even then, the conclusion may be that we are being too sensitive, that the person did not mean it that way, or that we should stop making everything about race.
It can be quite a performance. Unfortunately, the person experiencing racism did not audition for the role.
I sometimes wonder whether our national success story has made this conversation more difficult than it needs to be. Singapore has done a tremendous amount to present itself as a multicultural society. Our tourism campaigns celebrate the meeting of cultures and traditions, our public holidays recognise different religious festivals, and our national identity rests partly on the promise that people of different races can live together peacefully. These are achievements worth protecting. I would not want to dismiss the work that has gone into building the Singapore we have today.
But perhaps we have become so accustomed to telling the story of our success that we occasionally mistake the story for the entire reality.
A country can celebrate diversity without having eliminated prejudice. A neighbourhood can be peaceful without every resident feeling equally accepted. Two colleagues can work together for twenty years without either ever having to confront an uncomfortable assumption about the other. And a person can sincerely believe that they are not racist while continuing to make judgements about someone based on the colour of their skin, the food they eat or the language they speak.
These things can coexist. That is precisely what makes racism difficult to discuss. It does not always arrive wearing a name tag that reads RACIST, accompanied by dramatic music and a convenient villain's entrance. Sometimes, it comes disguised as a joke. Sometimes, it appears in an assumption about someone's ability, temperament or suitability for a job. Sometimes, it emerges when a person is surprised that someone who looks like you speaks English fluently, or when your presence in a particular space requires a little more explanation than someone else's.
And sometimes, it is the response to the experience that becomes just as tiring as the experience itself.
The Institute of Policy Studies and OnePeople.sg have been studying racial and religious harmony in Singapore for years. Their 2024 survey, reported in February 2025, offers a useful snapshot of where we stand. About 65.4 per cent of respondents rated racial and religious harmony in Singapore as high or very high, an increase from 57.1 per cent in 2018. That is encouraging. It suggests that many people genuinely feel that relations between communities have improved.
However, the same study found that 43.5 per cent of respondents said they formed assumptions about someone's behaviour based on their race, up from 35.2 per cent in 2018. The survey also found that reported workplace discrimination during job applications or promotion processes had declined, but minorities continued to be disproportionately affected. Among Malay respondents, 18.4 per cent reported experiencing racial discrimination in these employment contexts in 2024, compared with 3.7 per cent of Chinese respondents.
These findings, reported by CNA in its coverage of the IPS-OnePeople.sg study on 3 February 2025, do not tell us that Singapore has failed at racial harmony. Nor do they mean that everyone is secretly harbouring racial prejudice. What they do tell us is that positive perceptions of harmony can exist alongside persistent stereotypes and unequal experiences.
In other words, we can be making progress and still have work to do. We can feel comfortable with one another and still carry assumptions about one another. We can have a good relationship with our colleagues without necessarily examining the biases that influence how we assess their abilities.
Perhaps this is where the distinction between harmony and tolerance becomes important.
I have been thinking about the word tolerance. It is an interesting word because we often use it as though it is an unquestionable virtue. We talk about being tolerant of other cultures, other religions and other ways of life. In many ways, we should be. A society cannot function if everyone insists that the world must conform to their personal preferences.
But there is something slightly uncomfortable about the word when we apply it to people.
To tolerate something is, at its most basic, to allow it to exist even when we might not particularly like it. We tolerate the neighbour who practises the piano at an inconvenient hour. We tolerate the colleague who reheats fish in the office microwave. We tolerate the person who takes seventeen minutes to explain something that could have been communicated in three. These are necessary acts of social survival, and I am not suggesting that we must develop a deep emotional appreciation for every person we encounter. That would be exhausting in an entirely different way.
But people are not inconveniences to be endured.
When we speak of racial tolerance, are we saying that we accept one another as equal members of the same society, or merely that we have agreed not to interfere with one another too much? Is the expectation that we respect each other's right to exist, or that we refrain from expressing our discomfort with each other's existence?
There is a difference.
Harmony, at least as I understand it, does not require everyone to like everyone else. It does not mean that we must become best friends across racial lines, exchange recipes during every festive season or demonstrate our multicultural credentials by knowing the correct greetings for every religious holiday. Nor does it mean that we must agree on every cultural practice or avoid all disagreement for fear of offending someone.
Harmony is not the absence of friction. If anything, a society that never allows difficult conversations may simply be a society that has learnt to keep its disagreements out of sight.
Real harmony requires something more difficult than politeness. It requires us to recognise one another's dignity even when we do not share the same experiences, assumptions or beliefs. It requires us to be willing to listen when someone tells us that something we have said or done has hurt them, without immediately turning the conversation into a defence of our own character.
After all, there is a difference between saying, "I am not a racist, so you must have misunderstood me," and asking, "I did not intend to hurt you, but can you help me understand why it came across that way?"
The first statement closes a door. The second leaves it open.
I think many of us struggle with this because we have come to understand racism as a label for bad people rather than a problem that ordinary people can participate in, sometimes without realising it. If racism only belongs to people who are openly hateful, then all we need to do is make sure we are not like them. We can then return to our lives feeling reassured that we are on the right side of the issue.
But if prejudice can exist in our everyday assumptions, then the matter becomes a little more uncomfortable. It means that being a decent person is not the end of the conversation. It is the starting point.
This is also why I am uneasy when the existence of racism is debated as though the question can be settled by looking at the general state of race relations in Singapore. A positive national assessment is useful, but it cannot automatically invalidate the experiences of individuals. If most people in a neighbourhood feel safe, it does not mean the person who has been harassed there is mistaken. If most employees believe their workplace is fair, it does not mean that the person who has been overlooked because of their race has imagined the experience.
Averages are useful for understanding a population. They are less useful when we use them to silence the person standing in front of us.
The 2024 poll by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, conducted with the Ministry of Home Affairs, makes this tension particularly interesting. Among the 1,051 Singapore residents surveyed, 54 per cent rated race relations as good or very good. Yet 43 per cent felt that racism remained a problem in Singapore, while 44 per cent were neutral on that question. At least 35 per cent said they had experienced racially insensitive encounters, with online encounters accounting for the largest share among those who had experienced them.
These findings suggest that people can recognise the overall state of race relations positively while still acknowledging that racism has not disappeared. We do not necessarily have to choose between believing that Singapore has made progress and recognising that people continue to experience prejudice.
Perhaps we need to become more comfortable holding both truths at once.
And perhaps this is where our understanding of law comes into the picture.
Singapore is a country that believes in rules, regulations and clear consequences. There is something reassuring about knowing that certain forms of conduct are unacceptable and that there are mechanisms to address them. Laws can protect people, establish boundaries and discourage behaviour that causes harm. They matter, particularly when good intentions are not enough to protect those who are vulnerable to discrimination.
But I sometimes wonder what happens when our commitment to racial harmony depends too heavily on the existence of rules.
Imagine a society in which nobody makes racist remarks because they are afraid of the legal consequences. Nobody discriminates openly because they know there may be repercussions. Nobody publicly humiliates another person because they understand that such behaviour is unacceptable under the law.
On paper, this sounds like an improvement. People are protected from certain forms of harm, and society is less likely to descend into open hostility. I would certainly prefer this to a society in which people are free to express racial hatred without consequence.
But what happens when the fear of consequences is the only thing holding everything together?
What happens when someone believes that a person of another race is inferior but knows better than to say it aloud? What happens when discriminatory assumptions quietly influence a hiring decision, a social interaction or the way we interpret another person's behaviour? What happens when the law can regulate what we do, but cannot compel us to examine what we believe?
A society cannot legislate every private thought into kindness. Neither can it rely on the hope that everyone will spontaneously develop empathy. Laws and personal responsibility have to work together. The law establishes what we must not do to one another; our values determine whether we are willing to go further than the bare minimum.
This is not an argument against laws. It is an argument against mistaking compliance for character.
I think about this whenever we celebrate racial harmony as though it were a finished project. We have built institutions, policies and public rituals to help different communities coexist. These are important foundations. But foundations are not the same as a completed building, and certainly not one that can be left unattended indefinitely.
Harmony has to be practised in the ordinary places where nobody is handing out certificates for good behaviour. In the workplace, when we decide who is competent enough to lead. In our friendships, when we notice that our social circles have become remarkably similar to ourselves. In conversations, when somebody raises an uncomfortable experience and we have to choose between listening and dismissing it. In our homes, when children repeat something they have heard and the adults around them decide whether to laugh, correct them or pretend not to notice.
It is easy to celebrate diversity when it is presented to us in a neatly organised programme. It is harder to engage with diversity when it challenges something we have always assumed to be true.
And this brings me back to the exhaustion I mentioned earlier.
I do not think the solution is to stop talking about racism. I understand the temptation. There are days when I would rather discuss something else entirely, something that does not require me to explain the same basic principles all over again. Surely there are enough other things to worry about in Singapore. The cost of living alone could provide material for several thousand words, not to mention the price of a cup of coffee that seems to increase every time I blink.
But being tired of a conversation does not mean the conversation has become unnecessary. It may simply mean that we have not found a way to move it forward.
Perhaps we need fewer conversations that begin with the question of whether racism exists and more conversations about how we recognise it, respond to it and prevent it from becoming normalised. Perhaps we need to move beyond asking whether somebody intended to be racist and consider the consequences of what they said or did. Perhaps we need to make room for people to acknowledge their biases without assuming that admitting to one makes them irredeemably terrible human beings.
That last point matters to me. If every discussion of prejudice becomes a trial in which someone must either be declared innocent or condemned as a bad person, we should not be surprised when people become defensive. Nobody wants to be the villain in their own story. But we cannot learn from mistakes that we refuse to acknowledge.
There must be room for accountability without humiliation, and for honest conversations without the expectation that everyone will get everything right the first time. This does not mean that people who experience racism should be expected to educate everyone else patiently, or that they owe anyone forgiveness. It means that those of us who want to build a more harmonious society have to take responsibility for our own learning instead of outsourcing the entire exercise to the people most affected by the problem.
And perhaps we should also reconsider what we expect Racial Harmony Day to achieve.
I have nothing against the traditional costumes, the food tasting or the cultural performances. I think these activities can be meaningful, especially for children who might otherwise have limited opportunities to learn about the traditions of their neighbours. There is value in discovering that the person sitting beside you celebrates a different festival, follows different customs or grew up with a completely different set of family traditions.
But appreciation should not end with the food. We should be equally willing to learn about the experiences that are less comfortable to discuss. We can ask what it feels like to be repeatedly mistaken for a foreigner in the country where you were born. We can talk about why certain comments that seem harmless to one person may carry a different weight for another. We can examine how stereotypes influence our expectations of people, even when we believe ourselves to be fair-minded.
These conversations do not have to turn every school assembly into a sombre lecture. Children can learn about racism without being made to feel that their society is hopelessly broken. Adults can discuss discrimination without assuming that every disagreement is an act of hostility. We can acknowledge our shortcomings while still appreciating what we have managed to build together.
In fact, I would argue that this is what makes a celebration meaningful. We do not celebrate something because it is already perfect. We celebrate it because it matters enough for us to keep working at it.
So, are we racially harmonious, or are we merely racially tolerant?
I do not think the answer is as straightforward as I once wanted it to be. There are genuine friendships across racial lines, people who care deeply about one another and communities that have learnt to live together with trust and respect. There are also people who continue to experience discrimination, assumptions that remain stubbornly embedded in our social interactions and conversations that we would rather avoid because they make us uncomfortable.
Both realities belong to Singapore.
Perhaps tolerance is not the enemy of harmony. Perhaps it is where we begin. We first learn to coexist without harming one another, then learn to respect one another, and eventually develop the willingness to understand experiences beyond our own. These stages are neither automatic nor guaranteed, and they certainly do not happen at the same pace for everyone.
The danger is not that we begin with tolerance. The danger is that we mistake it for the destination.
Because if our racial harmony depends entirely on people behaving themselves, I think we have reason to be concerned. Rules can restrain certain behaviours, but they cannot guarantee that we will continue to treat one another with dignity when nobody is watching. If tolerance is merely the temporary decision to keep our prejudices to ourselves, what happens when our patience runs thin? What happens when a difficult economic period, a divisive public debate or a particularly inflammatory incident gives people permission to express what they have been holding back?
I do not ask these questions because I believe the worst is inevitable. I ask them because I would rather we take our harmony seriously enough to examine what sustains it.
And perhaps there is some hope in the fact that we are still asking these questions at all. The IPS-OnePeople.sg findings show improvements in trust between racial groups over time, even as stereotyping remains a concern. That is not a perfect report card, but perhaps society was never meant to be graded with a single tick or cross. Progress is possible without being complete, and recognising the work that remains does not erase the work already done.
Two days from now, we will celebrate Racial Harmony Day. There will be photographs, activities and reminders that Singapore is made up of many cultures and traditions. I hope we enjoy them. I hope the children have fun, the food is good, and the teachers do not have to spend the entire afternoon persuading everyone to participate.
But I also hope that, once the costumes have been returned and the decorations taken down, we remember that harmony is not something we can put away until next July.
It is what we practise on an ordinary Tuesday, when a colleague says something uncomfortable and we decide how to respond. It is what we practise when somebody tells us about an experience we have never had, and we resist the urge to explain why it could not possibly have happened. It is what we practise when we realise that being a decent person does not automatically make us free of prejudice, and we choose to keep learning anyway.
I would like to believe that we can become a society in which people do not have to prove that racism exists before they can speak about experiencing it. A society in which acknowledging discrimination is not mistaken for an attack on Singapore, but understood as part of our responsibility to make Singapore better. A society in which we can celebrate our diversity without becoming so attached to the image of racial harmony that we are afraid to examine the places where it falls short.
Perhaps that is an ambitious hope. But if we can build a country where people of different races share a home, a workplace and a future, surely we can also learn to listen to one another when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
I do not expect us to agree on everything. I do not even expect us to like everyone. I would, however, like us to reach a point where respect is not merely a behaviour we perform because the law requires it, or a virtue we display when the occasion calls for it.
I would like us to practise it because we recognise that the person standing before us deserves it, regardless of whether we understand their experiences or share their perspective.
That, to me, would be the difference between merely tolerating one another and living in genuine harmony.
And perhaps the next time someone tells us that racism exists in Singapore, we can resist the temptation to defend our national reputation long enough to ask a simpler question: what happened?
We might discover that listening is a much better place to begin than arguing about whether there is anything to listen to.
After all, racial harmony should not be so fragile that an honest conversation threatens to destroy it. If anything, it should be strong enough to survive one.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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